“In the Bible the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance.”

I think myself obliged, whatever my private apprehensions may be of the success, to do my duty, and leave events to their Disposer.

Even when we find not what we seek, we find something as well worth seeking as what we missed.

In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part.

From a knowledge of His work, we shall know Him.

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another’s learning.

He whose faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his faith.

Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry.

Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due con-templation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty.

The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs; I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

God would not have made the universe as it is unless He intended us to understand it.

Nature always looks out for the preservation of the universe.

God is the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.

He that condescended so far, and stooped so low, to invite and bring us to heaven, will not refuse us a gracious reception there.

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

My notebook couldn’t carry the burden of all those words which my heart once felt.

I’m in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.

Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.

I feel like I got a whole lot of living to do before I think about summing it up in a book.

I found my old diary tonight. A brokenness I had forgotten pen pressured so deep it punctured page. I ran my fingers over my words and there inside ridges black I found a little girl desperate for someone to save her, desperate for the very woman I have become.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.